The Awkward Black Man

Local Hero

My grandfather, and Sherman’s, was Theodore Brownley from Spiritville, Louisiana — a town that no longer exists.

Theodore moved to Brooklyn soon after the flood that washed Spiritville into the Mississippi in November 1949; at least that was what my cousin Sherman said that our grandfather told him. Grandpa Theodore came to Flatbush, bought an empty lot, built the house that Sherman was later born in, married Florida James from Brownsville, New York, and fathered three sons: Isaac, Blood, and my mother’s husband, Skill.

Florida bore their three sons in the first four years of marriage. The brothers Brownley courted three sisters born to Lucinda Cardwell, who lived with her brood across the street and down the block from the Brownley clan.

Three brides for three brothers, and, if you believe the rumors, there was some cross-pollination too.

My father, Skill Brownley, was married to Mint Cardwell. Our first cousin Theodora’s mom was Lana, and her father was Isaac. Blood married Nefertiti, then got killed in a bar fight just a year after she bore his son.

These names are very important because they are the stakes that hold down the billowing tent of my story, my lives. I am Stewart Cardwell-Brownley, born into the family of Skill Brownley — Grandpa Theodore’s youngest son. I have two brothers and one sister. Theodora had one sister and one brother. The three sisters that the Brownley brothers married had five other siblings. But the rest, even though I love them dearly, don’t figure much in the telling of my tale.

What matters is that Sherman, like his father, Blood, was killed in a street fight not three blocks from the house Theodore built. My first cousin Sherman did all things good and bad. He was a straight-A student, a Lothario of mythic proportions, nationally recognized for high school baseball and basketball, a devout Christian, a sometimes heavy drinker, and a street fighter. His hunger for truth was equaled only by his thirst for life. He could never get enough, and his heart was all over the place. I was closer to him than to anyone else in the Brownley clan. Partly because, even though he was only a year older than I, Sherman was my protector and teacher; he taught me almost everything I knew, including, though it seems unlikely, most things I learned after his death.

As a youth I was never very good in school or at athletics; neither was I popular. My parents never pushed me much, but they always offered to help me with schoolwork, and my father played catch with me and my younger brother Floyd on fair days in Prospect Park, when he wasn’t putting in overtime at the machine shop.

I had three friends through all the years of public school. Bespectacled Mister Pardon, Fat Jimmy Ellis, and Ballard “the Perv” Ingram. We would hang out on the lunch court before and after school, trading comic books and gossiping about the sex exploits of everyone else.

Every now and then Sherman would join us, usually waiting to hook up with some girl. We liked him because he was the best of us, all of us. He ran faster, stood his ground no matter the odds, and he could recite every school assignment by heart. At church he sang with the gospel choir, and afterward he’d make out with one of the church daughters in the storeroom behind the dais upon which the choir performed.

But even though he was a blazing star among assorted lumps of clay, Sherman would join me and my friends on the lunch court just as if he was one of us, talking about the X-Men and teachers he couldn’t stand.

I remember one day he asked short, squinty-eyed Ballard the Perv what comic book character he wanted to be.

“Not,” Sherman stipulated, “the one you like the most but the one you would be if you could be.”

Ball, which is what we called Ballard sometimes, scrunched up his eyes and stared at my first cousin like he might be a cop who needed the right answer or else he would kick some ass.

“The Thing,” Ball said at last. “The Thing from the Fantastic Four.”

Sherman smiled and winked at me.

“He’s ugly,” Fat Jimmy said.

“Yeah,” Ball replied, “but he’s got a secret power.”

“What power?” Mister asked. Mister Pardon was dark-skinned, like the rest of us, and named Mister, in the Southern black tradition, so that no white man could disrespect him. He was an exceptional student, though he stuttered when talking to anyone but us three and sometimes Sherman.

“His dick,” the Perv said. “It’s rough the way my uncle Billy says that girls like it, and it’s really big ’cause of those cosmic rays.”

Ball’s voice was so filled with wonder and desire that I was afraid Sherman might turn mean and make fun of him. I and my friends were all around thirteen, while my cousin was fourteen going on forty. Sherman could be cutting, and I had the urge, but not the nerve, to stand between him and Ball.

Sherman bit his lower lip and cut his eyes at the Perv.

“Yeah, right?” he said with a smile. “That’s what I always thought about the Hulk. You know like if the madder he get the stronger he is, then maybe the hornier he get the bigger his dick is.”

Ballard the Perv’s eyes opened wide, and I believed that he’d dream about being the Hulk for the next year.

One afternoon, more than a year after the bio-philosophical talk about the sexual prowess of superheroes, Sherman came up to me and my friends on the lunch court. This was unusual, because my cousin had graduated to high school and didn’t come by very much anymore.

Sherman sat down and greeted me and my friends. He told us about a fight he’d got in with a cop’s son. The kid was named Carl and was in the eleventh grade.

“I got beat down,” Sherman said, with a wry grin, “but I gave him a black eye and chipped his front tooth.”

Mister, Jimmy, and Ball had a hundred questions, but Sherman said, “We can talk about all that later. Right now I need Stew here to help me with somethin’.”

I was due home in less than an hour. My mother and father were very strict, and even though I hadn’t done very well at anything in particular, I always obeyed them and showed up on time. On the other hand, Sherman had never asked for my help before. He made sure to spend time with me a day or two each month. Once in a while I stayed over at the apartment where he and his mother, Titi, lived. At night, after she was asleep, Sherman would take me up to the roof, where he smoked cigarettes and drank sweet wine.

“You see down there in the alley?” he once asked me.

“Yeah, I see.”

“All kinds of things happen down there in the nighttime. People fuckin’ and fightin’, and sometimes they die. Right down there in the open but in the dark.”

I peered into the night, which was broken now and then by fluttering moths or the passing headlights of some car. If I had just looked into that abyss by myself I wouldn’t have seen a thing; but through Sherman’s eyes I could imagine the way the darkness, with the partial architecture of the urban night, was magical, alive. When I inhaled it felt as if that night was coming inside me.

And so, when Sherman came on that lunch court and said that he needed me — I went.

On the A train to Manhattan we sat on a bench for three, and he looked me over.

“Your hair is all right,” he said, after a minute-long inspection, “but you gotta button that shirt to the top and tuck in those tails.”

I did as I was told.

“Did you brush your teeth this morning?” Sherman asked.

“Yeah.”

“How about a shower?”

“I took one after gym class.”

Sherman was still studying me. He seemed more like a teacher or a young father than my cousin and friend.

We were passing underneath the East River when he said, “I met this girl from California goes to a private school on Seventy-Second Street. Her parents are out of town tonight, and she said she wanted me to come by, only she had already planned to have one of her girlfriends come over, and so she asked if I could bring another guy.”

“Girls?” I was pretty sure that half the subway car could hear the fear in my voice.

“Don’t worry, man. Tanya — that’s my girl — Tanya said that Mona is fine. So you don’t have to worry about me puttin’ you with no ugly girl.”

I swallowed hard again and tried to think of some way out of that train, that destination. I had hardly ever kissed a girl, and when I had it hadn’t seemed so great — for her.

“When you kiss,” Sherman said, as if he could read my thoughts, “you got to give her some tongue. Girls like that, and you will too.”

We got out in lower Manhattan south of Canal. From there we walked west. On Washington we came to this modern-looking apartment building that had glass walls and a doorman seated behind a high desk.

Sherman walked right up to the desk, and I followed a few steps behind.

The doorman had bright copper skin and an accent from somewhere in the Spanish-speaking New World.

“Can I help you?” he asked, dubiously.

“Tanya Highsmith,” Sherman said. “Apartment fourteen twenty-seven.”

That was the most impressed I ever was with my cousin, in this life. Tanya Highsmith, apartment fourteen twenty-seven. He spoke clearly, with no hesitation or shame. He wasn’t some young tough from the ’hood but a man coming to see a woman.

The doorman nodded and picked up a phone.

The next thing I knew I was standing at an off-white door on the fourteenth floor in a wide hallway that had avocado-colored carpeting and muted rose-red walls.

When Sherman pressed the doorbell I got a little dizzy. Standing there I worried that I’d fall on my face. I do believe that the only reason I didn’t faint was so as not to embarrass my cousin and best friend.

The door swung inward, and I was surprised at the young woman who stood there. The beautiful teenager wore a gray silk T-shirt under an emerald cotton vest that had little red eyes stitched into it. Her skirt was a gold color with a blue hem, I remember. She was barefoot and a little breathless. But none of that mattered at first glance. What struck me was that she was a black girl; well, not really black but rather a creamy brown. At any rate — she wasn’t white. I figured that in a building that nice, with a girl from a private school, that Sherman must have found him a white girl to visit.

“Hey, Tanya,” Sherman said.

“Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “You two look exactly alike.”

I’d been told before that Sherman and I bore a strong resemblance. I couldn’t see it; I think that was because he was so powerful and brave and cool, and I was just barely normal.

“They do!” another girl said. This one was also under the category of our race, what people nowadays call African American. But where Tanya was slender of face and body, her friend was a curvaceous girl with skin just a touch darker.

They were Sherman’s age, maybe even a little older.

“Mona,” Tanya said, “this is Sherman and his cousin Stewart.”

“If we look just alike,” Sherman said, “then how you know I ain’t Stew?”

The skinny girl grinned, cocked her head to the side, and said, “Because I know what I like. Come on in. I got it all ready.”

Tanya took us through the living room into a yellow-and-red-tiled kitchen. Past the stove there was a little nook of a room with no door, in which sat a small, square, orange table-booth. There she had set out a crystal decanter filled with amber liquor and four bulbous drinking glasses.

“Cognac,” Tanya said. “Like I told you.”

Sherman and Tanya sat on one side of the table, her in and him out. I climbed into our side, and Mona pulled in close beside me.

Tanya explained to her friend and me that she met Sherman on the F train and that the first thing he said to her was to ask if she had ever had champagne.

“I asked him why,” she said. “And he told me that I looked like I was rich and so I must have had some.”

“What did you say?” Mona asked. At the same time she laid her left hand on my right.

“She said that there was something better than champagne,” Sherman answered.

“Cognac,” Tanya finished, gesturing at the contents of the tabletop.

She poured us each a generous dram and warned us to sip it because the cognac was strong.

When Mona let go of my hand to reach for her glass, I felt both bereft and relieved. She got my glass too, turned toward me on the small bench, and clinked hers to mine. She smiled at me with lips that I will always think a woman’s lips and smile should be.

“Cheers,” she whispered, and we all sipped.

“Damn!” Sherman said. “This feels warm all down in my chest.”

“That’s what it does,” Tanya said, a note of triumph in her voice.

“This how rich people feel all the time?” my cousin asked.

Tanya’s reply was to lean forward and kiss him.

Sherman already knew how to kiss. After a moment with her mouth, he moved to the side of her neck. This caress brought out a smile, and the next thing I knew Mona gave me a peck on the mouth. My tongue was ready, but her lips moved quickly to my ear.

“We should go in the other room and leave them alone,” she whispered.

Mona poured some more brandy into our glasses and then led me by the hand into the living room. There we drank and whispered and kissed — a lot. Toward the bottom of the snifters my trepidations evaporated. Mona showed me how and where to kiss and when to linger. In hushed tones she told me about her white boyfriend and how he would never let her guide him to her desire.

I was overexcited and so suffered two premature ejaculations, but Mona was more experienced and explained, between kisses, what was going on with me and how we could get back to where we wanted to be.

Somewhere in the night I looked up from the sofa and saw Sherman and Tanya, mostly naked, tiptoeing toward another part of the house.

“Kiss me, Stew,” Mona said, to bring my attention back to her.

The couch Mona and I staked out was long and deep, like the sleep we tumbled down into. It was slumber in an upholstered hole at the side of a road in some fairy tale my mother might have read aloud before my siblings and I fell to sleep...

My mother. I came awake suddenly, so deeply afraid that even the loss of my virginity failed to buoy me. I sat up quickly and felt a wave of pain go through my head. I gasped, looked around, and saw Sherman sitting in a stuffed chair set perpendicular to the foot of our sofa.

Mona groaned and shifted under a blanket I didn’t remember.

“I been waitin’ for you to wake up, cousin.”

“Does your head hurt this bad?” I asked.

“It’ll go away in the air outside,” Sherman explained.

“My parents are gonna kill me,” I predicted, through pain and some nausea.

“Uh-uh, man. I got that covered,” my cousin promised.

It was late May, and the sun was rising at around five that morning as Sherman and I made our way to the subway.

“What you mean you got it covered?” I asked Sherman for the sixth time as he handed me a subway token.

“While you was playin’ makin’ Mona moan I called Titi an’ asked her to call your parents and say you was sleepin’ ovah.”

No magician ever impressed me as much as Sherman did.

“And she did it?” I asked.

“Sure she did. I told her that you and me were on a double date. She understands what men need to do.”

For a week or so after the visit with Tanya and Mona, I avoided my cousin. I wanted to forget about cognac and sex and Manhattan too. I felt so guilty that I was even trying to do some homework one Wednesday evening in the bedroom I shared with my brother Floyd.

“Stew?” my mother, Mint Cardwell-Brownley, called from the hall.

“Yeah, Mom?”

“Phone. It’s your cousin Sherman. If he wants you to come over, tell him you have to come back here to bed.”

“Hey, cousin,” he said, when I answered.

“Hi.” I didn’t want to be rude.

“Where you been, man?” he asked.

“Nowhere. Studyin’ for finals is all.”

“Well, come on ovah an’ I’ll help.”

There was no way that I was going to see Sherman and Nefertiti. My soul was on the line; that’s how it felt. I tried to think of some kind of reason that I had to stay and do my homework alone. Maybe it was some kind of spelling that I had to commit to memory, and Floyd was already testing me. That was a good excuse.

“What you thinkin’, Stew?” my cousin asked.

“Nuthin’.”

“So you comin’ or what?”

“OK.” And that was it. My soul was sold, and Sherman owned it.

That early evening we went down an alley past the back of a bodega. We stopped for a minute while Sherman looked around.

“You see that little window ovah the door?” he asked me.

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s what they call a transom, and Julio’s ain’t got no alarm.”

“So?”

“I’m ’a break into that bastard an’ steal one hundred dollars.”

“Why?” I was so scared that even the spiritual devastation of sex seemed tame.

“’Cause I can. ’Cause I wanna do everything. Don’t worry, Stew. I won’t bring you into it.”

The years passed, and Sherman and I were fast companions. Whenever he broke the law he did it alone, but later he’d tell me all about it — step-by-step. I spent lots of time with him and his mother, my aunt Titi, in their sixth-floor walk-up apartment. Titi was always nice, kissing me hello and goodbye.

My own mother rarely kissed me. I had never much thought about that until I became the beloved chattel of my aunt and cousin.

After high school Sherman was accepted to NYU on full scholarship, and then I, the next year, went to work on an early-morning paper-delivery crew for the New York Times.

Somewhere in that time our cousin Theodora decided to take the NYC civil service exam. She asked Sherman to help, and he did. I hung around because it felt better to be with him than my own parents and siblings.

Theodora and I studied together. I had no desire to take the test, but I liked her. We’d laugh and try to fool each other, and Sherman told me that she’d do better if I was there too. Theodora was slender and tall, and she told us on the third night of study that she liked women more than men.

“I just like the way girls kiss,” she admitted between practice tests. “It’s like I know something with them, when men keep their secrets.”

I didn’t care about who she loved. Theodora was my blood, and I had learned from Sherman and Titi that that was all that mattered.

A few years later, after Theodora had gotten a clerk job at the local police precinct, Sherman got into a fight with the husband of one of his girlfriends.

It isn’t what it sounds like. Isabella Vasquez was a first-grade schoolteacher, who taught many of the kids that our siblings and cousins had produced. Sherman got to know her when taking our nieces and nephews to school on Thursday mornings.

Isabella’s husband, Murphy, one night got drunk and knocked out one of her teeth. So Sherman kicked his ass.

Murphy got mad at that, and with two of his friends he beat my cousin to death. They jumped him in an alley and stomped his face and ribs. Nefertiti and I sat by his body in the mortuary all Saturday morning, while Murphy Halloran and his friends were being arraigned and charged.

Nefertiti held the vigil in her sixth-floor walk-up. All forty-seven of the Cardwells, Brownleys, and Cardwell-Brownleys came. Our grandparents were dead, but Titi had brought out an old photograph of them and tacked it to the wall.

I was there from the beginning to the end, serving sweet wine with butter and salami sandwiches on hard rolls. My mother, Mint, when she first saw me there, sneered in a way that I didn’t understand — at the time. Many others who knew how close I was to Sherman said how sorry they were and how much alike we looked.

I stayed to clean up after the wake. Titi watched me from the kitchen door.

“Sherman loved you,” she said.

Her tone was sweet, but still I took it as an accusation. I castigated myself for failing to be there to fight side by side with him.

“He was my best friend,” I uttered, trying not to cry, again.

“More than that.”

“I know we’re blood, but I always thought of him as something more, I guess.”

“He was,” Nefertiti said. “Your father and his are the same.”

“My father, Skill?”

“No. My husband, Blood.”

I stopped drying plates and turned to look at Titi. She’s a dark-skinned woman with bright eyes and graying dreads. I could see that she had always loved her husband and son in me. That connection was the source of her kisses and kind words. It was why she protected me when Sherman and I spent the night with those fancy girls.

She took a light-brown snakeskin wallet from the pocket in her apron and handed it to me.

“It was Sherman’s,” she said. “I couldn’t even look inside. They killed my boy. This world killed him. He was too beautiful, too beautiful.”

“I can’t, I can’t take this, Titi.”

“Please,” she implored. “I’ll sleep easier if I know he’s with you.”

The next day was the funeral. Six hundred people and more showed up.

Mister Pardon, Fat Jimmy, and Ballard the Perv were there. They told me how sorry they were and dredged up the old stories about Sherman’s adventures at school. I liked my friends, but they seemed very far away. Or maybe it was me; ever since I’d heard that Sherman had died I’d felt that there was a wall between me and everyone else. Everyone except Nefertiti.

I sat through the ceremony thinking that Sherman was my brother, my brother.

My mother’s husband — my uncle Skill — and I took opposite sides at the front of the casket.

The reception after the interment was held in the house that our grandfather Theodore Brownley had built. I hung around the corners, talking to people as little as possible. People talking and laughing and remembering things about Sherman just made me angry. Didn’t they realize that someone who was so much more had been taken? Didn’t they understand what Sherman was in this world?

That morning I’d broken up with my girlfriend of two years, Leora Dumas, because she said that Sherman had been a bad influence on me.

“He was crooked,” Leora said. “And you couldn’t see that he was holding you back.”

I was living with Leora because I didn’t make enough delivering papers to afford my own place. She wanted to get married, but I really didn’t have any interest in that. I guess Sherman dying meant that I had to move on, no matter what Leora said.

So what if I gambled with Sherman sometimes or drank too much or bought things I couldn’t afford? My cousin, my brother, made me feel that life was important, that I was important. Without him I was nobody.

“You look so much like him,” a woman said.

It was Natasha Koskov, from Brighton Beach. She was a breathless Russian with a long neck and lips like Mona Tremont, the first girl I ever really kissed.

“That’s what they say,” I replied, wondering where the words and light tone in my voice had come from.

“He loved you,” she said, looking into my brown eyes with her black ones.

“You wanna go get a drink?” I imagined Sherman asking.

“Yes,” Natasha Koskov replied.

We drank and kissed, went to her apartment, and made love. She called me Sherman, and after the first round I didn’t correct her.

I was another man that night. Natasha wasn’t loving me but Sherman — Sherman, who could not be erased from this world or her heart or mine.

Sometime after three in the morning I was walking from the subway toward Titi’s apartment building because I had no place else to go.

I hadn’t lived with my parents for three years, and the thought that my father was not my father kept me from calling them. I wondered if he had known, if he and my mother had kept the truth from me. Maybe that was why my mother showed me so little affection.

“Hey, you!” a man said from somewhere to my left.

I turned and saw a rough-skinned, earth-toned man wearing a hoodie. He carried a small pistol in his right hand. I’d had a lot to drink, but I was sober. I was coming back from a night of lovemaking, but I was downcast, brooding.

“Gimme yo’ got-damned wallet, main!”

He could have demanded anything else: my shoes, my baby finger, every cent I ever made. But it was Sherman’s wallet in my back pocket. It was my brother’s legacy this man was asking for.

I looked at him, and time slowed. Under a night-time lamppost his sludge-colored eyes were frightened, as mine should have been. I suppressed a smile, breathed in the darkness, and looked up suddenly as if seeing something surprising behind his back. It was just enough to cause him to falter and to give me time to reach out with both hands and tear the gun from his grip. He tried to grab it away, but I pulled back the hammer and steadied my right hand with my left. This was something Sherman had taught me with a pistol he kept in the top drawer of his bureau.

“Now I want your got-damned money, man!” I said on that dark and empty street. There were tears in my eyes.

The thief heard in my grief-stricken, strained voice that he was as close to dead as he was likely to be before that final breath. He reached into a pocket and came out with a wad of cash that he’d probably robbed from other brooding late-night strollers. He held the cash out to me.

“Drop it on the concrete and haul yo’ ass outta here ’fore I shoot you dead.”

It was the terrified look on the mugger’s face that made me decide to kill him. I was outraged that a man who made his living robbing others would not be brave enough to face the consequences of his crimes. His cowardice negated any claim to clemency.

I was just about to shoot the mugger when a bright light flashed, a siren chirped, and a magnified voice called out, “Drop the weapon! This is the police!”

In that moment I argued internally about the action I should take. One side of my mind said that the mugger should die, no matter what some bright light and bullhorn said.

“No, cousin,” Sherman argued. “You got to live for Titi and for me too. You could have killed him, but now you got to drop the gun, get down on your knees, and put your hands behind your head.”

As Sherman said these things, I did them.

The mugger stayed on his feet, trembling.

The policemen, two of them, hurried over — their guns drawn, their eyes searching for trickery and deceit.

“Don’t say anything, cousin,” Sherman whispered. “Not a word.”

They took us, me and the man that tried to rob me, to the precinct station. I was put in a small interrogation room and handcuffed to a metal hook anchored in the wall. A cop in a suit tried to question me, but I wouldn’t so much as look at him.

A long time passed. During that period I thought about Sherman and the words he had spoken years before when talking about what he’d do if he were caught in some crime. I realized that he had been teaching me how to survive after he was gone.

When the door came open again, my cousin Theodora entered. She was the last person I expected to see, hastily clad in blue jeans and a long turquoise T-shirt. Her hair was wrapped up in a nylon stocking, and there were bags under her eyes.

She stared at me with a confused look on her face. Then, slowly, the answer to the riddle of who I was and who they thought I was, came to her.

She squatted down in front of me, her face not two inches away from mine.

“Stew?” she whispered.

I couldn’t speak.

“Why you had Sherman’s wallet on you?” my cousin asked.

“Titi,” I uttered softly.

Theodora understood.

“Listen, Stew,” she murmured. “They found me as the contact in Sherman’s wallet. They think you’re him. Tell me what happened, and I’ll try and get you outta here.”

“Man tried to mug me, and I grabbed away his gun.”

Theodora was well known at the precinct. They looked up the mugger’s records and Sherman’s to find that my mugger, Chris Hatter, had been arrested for violent crimes many times. That, and the fact that his fingerprints and the ones on the bullets matched, got me released.

Titi let me come live with her.

Sleeping in Sherman’s bed, waking up each day and putting on his clothes, made me feel... different, more and more so each day. I began reading his library of college books and the thirteen volumes of the detailed journal he’d kept since the age of ten. And, slowly, I made a plan for my future.

I applied to college, saying in my essay that I wanted another bachelor’s degree, one in English literature because I wanted to teach.

Six months later I was in Greenwich Village at one of eight NYU registration tables. The table I stood in line for was specified for people with last names that started with letter A, B, or C.

I stood there thinking about the police captain who harangued me for not telling the arresting officers that I was the victim of the mugger I had disarmed.

“...and we might have let him go,” the captain said. “By keeping quiet you could have put a dangerous criminal back on the street...”

And now I was at the front of the line at registration.

“Name?” a blond girl with a wide face and rimless glasses asked.

Instead of responding I gave her the driver’s license from my wallet.

She took the card and read it, looked up, and said, “Sherman Cardwell-Brownley?”

I sighed, smiled, and nodded. She smiled back and started going through a box of large envelopes sitting next to her. The young woman — her name tag read “Shauna” — found the name and handed me my schedule for the fall semester. I had been given a dorm room, a roommate named Lucian Meyers, and a laminated card with the photo of a face on it that looked a lot like mine.